I feel this is a horrible anti-consumer practice, but their ROI must be incredibly low. I don't remember the last time I played a game on a Mac. I wonder how Apple Arcade is doing.
Some games do move forward to 64-bit but it will certainly require several years for the Mac game market (such as it is) to recover even to the point it had reached.
I doubt that Epic would have bothered targeting Metal in UE4 if it were macOS only. With it, building games for Macintosh for a great deal of developers is fairly trivial. Unity also targets Metal, as far as I am aware.
Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).
Also, Snow Leopard may have been the last version to support 32 bit processors, but I don't think support for 32 bit apps was deprecated that long ago? Certainly, Apple themselves was still releasing 32bit software back then—if you have a copy of iWork '09 (which got updated as late as 2012), it's 32 bit.
And while you're right it was deprecated immediately, I do recall universal binaries were soft and then hard deprecated some years ago but I could tell you the exact date. I know there's a lot of vintage software that would never be updated, but like, a good chunk of stuff seems to have been new development or continued support.
You will never see Sony release a PS4 update that drops support for 2013-era PS4 games, at least not purposefully. If they did, people would be very mad.
I did saw Sony drop the almost unused GL ES support on the PS 2.
For non-games, a lot of the Mac software that was still 32 bit was using Carbon, which doesn't have a 64 bit variant. Carbon is old as heck, but if you're using it, there's no upgrade path other than a complete rewrite. That may or may not be worthwhile versus EOL'ing the software.
(As a complete tangent, I recently learned that Apple did once promise a 64 bit version of Carbon. The library was present in the developer preview of Leopard, and many devs began building with it. But then it was gone in Leopard's final release, and Apple never mentioned it again.)
For example, one thing I noticed on the iOS side (when it went from 32-bit to 64-bit) is that pixel position rounding changed so you would see things like random one-pixel gaps where textures were previously adjacent, etc. These things add up, and a company might decide an older title is not worth fixing.
On the Mac side, the entire damned UI library was thrown out (Carbon), and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if games had been relying on it. That is a huge thing to just redo, and again I would not blame any game company for not bothering to spend the resources.
I have 118 games in my library, 17 of which are Windows-only. Only 25 of the remaining 101 MacOS-compatible games survived the 64-bit upgrade.
Edit: thinking about it a little more though, this has been the situation for many many months, but I only realized over the weekend how bad it was because I've moved almost all of my gaming to my Nintendo Switch. (I only happened to return to Steam because I wanted to play A Short Hike.)
Plenty of FUD in that UI.
It sucks because I feel like gaming on the Mac was actually quite nice for a bit. With Steam/Source running on Mac you actually had a good run where you could play a lot of great games. I remember being so excited to play TF2 on the Mac.
The only games worth developing on the Mac are the 99¢ style iOS games. Anything else just isn't worth it, as developers have been burned too many times now. Just a matter of time before Apple makes it mandatory to use some technology or drops support for something that's currently required and everything has to be updated.
It's back to running games in a VM for me. Not the worst thing, really.
The biggest difficulty I experience with gaming on Linux is Nvidia and their atrocious drivers. Getting games to run isn't very hard these days as long as you can manage to get your GPU to render an image.
I should've bought AMD...
Not according to [this reddit user's analysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/dgvmkk/crazy_...).
LOL. Even otherwise, without factoring in the percentage of operating expenses devoted to supporting Linux, trying to calculate profit numbers is meaningless.
Once it's on there, you don't really have to worry about constant breaking changes from the operating system changing its audio subsystem or weird graphics drivers.
For Mac - Apple has to make gaming a bigger priority, and that's clearly not going to happen. A ~$1000 upgradable Apple machine with a powerful graphics card that can run the latest games is a pipe dream.
For Linux - It's the same problem as building any software for Linux that caters to the non-server non-developer segment. There just isn't enough of a business justification.
Most AAA games are designed with the trash hardware of consoles in mind, so laptops with more powerful GPUs handle them just fine. Apple's desktop offerings are abominable in terms of value and sticker price, but they pretty much own the non-Walmart-quality laptop market...